A Rwandan woman testifying*at the first war crimes trial in Canadian history told a Montreal court Monday she smeared the blood of her sister on her forehead and pretended to be dead for three days to stay safe...
The woman*told the court she was a Tutsi living in Butare at the time of the genocide.

She said she*and her sister left their home for the local school by order of the Hutus. The attacks began at the school, she said.

The woman*said she was slashed on the forehead with a machete while trying to escape. She fell and lost consciousness, she said.

She woke up lying on top of her dead sister, she said.*She smeared her sister's blood on herself and spent the next three days pretending to be dead, the woman said.

When she finally left the school, she had to step on bodies to get out because there was no open space on the floor, the woman testified.

President Thabo Mbeki has "race myopia" and his shortsightedness is costing South Africa and the sub-continent dearly, said Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Tony Leon.

Leon said: "On the three overriding crises that have occurred on his presidential watch - HIV/Aids, crime and Zimbabwe - the president's steadfast refusal to take necessary action is traceable to a blinkered attitude towards race."

At a hospital bed in South Africa, a 64-year-old grandmother is recovering from multiple fractures to her legs and left arm -- injuries from Zimbabwe police who beat her repeatedly.

"I thought I'd end up dead," Sekai Holland said. "It was brutal, it was primitive, and it was really, really meant to break us physically -- and in our spirits."

A brutal crackdown against opponents of President Robert Mugabe has intensified in recent weeks. Holland, a member of the main opposition movement in Zimbabwe, became one of the victims.

Police violently broke up a peaceful opposition prayer vigil in the capital of Harare on March 11. Dozens were arrested, and one opposition member died from his injuries. Holland says she had gone to a local police station to ask about her injured colleagues when police turned on her.

Mugabe's 27 years of misrule have taken a country that was once prosperous — the breadbasket of Africa, it was called — and turned it into a poverty-stricken hellhole rife with famine, genocide and terror, and lacking rule of law.

One of the most important tools of Dr. Alain Mouanga's trade is a rubber hammer.

It's not the most predictable tool for a psychiatrist. But it comes in handy in this capital city, where Mouanga -- the country's only working psychiatrist -- must convince his patients he has the power to heal.

At some point during nearly every visit, Mouanga asks his patients to lie on the examining table.

"Don't be afraid," he says as he taps the reflex hammer up and down their bodies, gently lifting and extending limbs.

A 42-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly killing a woman and removing parts of her body in Thohoyandou, Limpopo police said on Saturday.
The man's arrest follows the murder last year of a 35-year-old woman, Superintendent Ailwei Mushavhanamadi said...
The woman was apparently killed while fetching wood at a mountain with her children.
"Her upper lip and hands were cut off."...
Mushavhanamadi said the arrested man was also linked to a number of ritual killings in the area.

Over the past two years there has been a 48 percent increase in child rape in South Africa according to safety and security statistics for 2006. Between 2002 and 2004 a total of 669 children were raped by someone who already had a rape conviction. And of those cases, more than 20 percent of the children were raped by a sexual offender who had been convicted of rape more than once.

Dr Marcel Londt, founder of a sexual offenders rehabilitation programme at the Kenilworth Clinic, said South Africa was a "fertile breeding ground" for violent men. Londt has spent more than 10 years researching their behaviour. She said there were commonalities between them and their backgrounds that pointed towards a bigger problem within South African society.